Wednesday, 22 August 2007

cc - week 04 - midi sequencing/cubase

Well I just happened to purchase a new firewire audio interface which just happened to come with Cubase LE. I thought what a coincidence, so I installed it.

Then after being distracted, oops i mean having fun, with the baby (who is just starting to smile and is almost interactive), I got to work.

I've been using Cubase since about 1993 on an Atari, and sporadically since then so it presented no major challenges. However with this LE version I only get 2 vsti slots, so i visited Mr Universal Sound Module. After all, you can programme 16 voices (possibly more, I havent read its particulars), and I've always been a sucker for general midi.The other synth is a freeware organ I'm quite fond of, Oddly Ogran.

I also had to sort out my sound card latency as I've got far too many devices attached and the current major audio interface is a griffin iMic which has occasional problems with using ASIO. I got around that by just using the built in audio with the very handy ASIO4ALL universal ASIO drivers (even though I do have a brand new firewire interface presently acting as a firewire hub for my external drive and it would have involved some rooting around for cables and patching, and even potentially a restart).

The major challenge was remembering how to play real time, I so rarely do so, and trying to get the hang of the minor latency and quantisation is always fun.Also not working in loops, which I made a conscious choice to make most of the voices non-looped.

As you can tell from the picture, the first voice (harpsichord), is a repeated loop, but all other voices are not. I went through various sections and moved notes around in the midi editor (mainly the drums), played with a couple of volumes, did some spatial positioning and then bounced it down...